Thursday, October 6, 2011

GeoTools 8.0-M2 Released

If you are using maven GeoTools 8.0-M2 is available from the OSGeo repository. This is a milestone build made conjunction with uDig 1.2.3.

There are lots of exciting improvements (see the release notes below for the complete list).

Micheal Bedward has been putting an amazing amount of work into the gt-swing module. The visible change is cleaning up the use of MapContent, MapViewport and the new Layer classes. The example code used in the documentation has been updated to reflect the changes to gt-swing.

There are many more improvements under hood for the gt-swing module as the internals have been refactored to be nice and clean, easy to follow and most importantly testable. This last point really reflects the hard work and dedication involved as gt-swing is groomed to meet the QA guidelines required to be included in the library proper.

Maurcio has found time to update the Contextual Query Language (CQL) to leverage the the new temporal filter support that has been added to support WFS 2.0.

Andrea has been very busy supporting the gt-renderer module (in particular to enable the work in gt-swing). He has also found time to work on a couple amazing new features - the most popular of which is a new StyleBuilder allowing the definition of an SLD style in a few lines of code.

Jody got a little bit of time to work on the process support for this release. The big change is support for annotation based process definition (with a tutorial created during the FOSS4G code sprint so you can easily define your own processes). The process implementations have been have been split into gt-process-raster, gt-process-feature and gt-process geometry and received a huge influx of high quality implementations from the GeoServer project. This results in fifty processes being available out of the box.

Finally this release makes use of JTS 1.12 with the wonderful improvement of equalsExact, equalsTopo and equalsNorm as described in our docs. This change really improves the usability of Geometry for the JTS library and reduces frustration for new users.

Java 6 - yes! Thanks to Christian Mueller for updating the build instructions for this one. Special thanks to Andrea for updating the image rendering tests to account for different font metrics between Java 5 and Java 6.

Allow Build with Maven 2 or Maven 3 - Congrats to Cliff for his first change proposal - and Andrea and Ben for doing the work!

Temporal Filter Support - another great bit of work from Justin (a stepping stone for WFS 2.0)

Detailed information about Function arguments and Return Type - thanks to Justin and Jody for sorting out the use of Parameters and filling in the information for the existing functions. This is a key improvement which will make the library and style creation much easier to use.

As always we welcome volunteers to the GeoTools project. We have a great team, stop by the geotools-developer list and join the fun.
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